How a Wound Heals

Last night’s Oscar ceremony and some of the commentary around the ceremony make the best possible case for why diversity matters. We largely knew what to expect with host Seth MacFarlane—immature sexist jokes that weren’t quite funny but could be if he tried, just a little. And then of course he offered a racist joke, a homophobic joke, a fat joke or two (the Rex Reed joke had a little something to it). This is what MacFarlane does and he’s been very successful.

The ceremony was what it was and MacFarlane is who he is. Most of his jokes fell flat, not because they were offensive, but because they weren’t good. They lacked imagination or intelligence and were largely predicated on the notion that the word “boob” is hilarious, which if you are eleven, I suppose it is. By the end of the night MacFarlane had rendered himself irrelevant, sticking to traditional jokes about the length of the ceremony and waiting for the show’s merciful end, for all of us.

And then, there was a tweet from The Onion, referring to nine-year old Quvenzhané Wallis as a c-word. The tweet was meant to be satirical because satire is what The Onion traffics in. I am guessing the tweet was designed to comment on how we discuss famous young women on a night where Anne Hathaway was criticized as too earnest and Kristen Stewart was criticized as too sullen and unappreciative of her blessings. Young women in Hollywood cannot win, no matter what they do. There are more than a few smart jokes that could illustrate this rock and hard place women in Hollywood are crammed into.

I do believe the person responsible for The Onion tweet in question would have made that tasteless joke about any nine-year old actress. This tweet was ill advised and repulsive, not just because the actress was nine, or because MacFarlane had, earlier in the evening, made a joke about her being too old for George Clooney in sixteen years, but primarily because young black women, black girls, are regularly hypersexualized. There was this additional, fraught context that someone didn’t take into consideration and probably couldn’t take into consideration because they are oblivious. They are oblivious to the context because they’ve never been around people who are familiar with it, because they’ve never been held accountable.

People often fail to understand the importance of diversity. They assume it’s all about quotas and political correction but it is about so much more. Diversity (and we’re talking race, class, gender, sexuality, political affiliation, religion, all of it) is about putting multiple points of view into a conversation. It’s about ensuring that no one is operating in the kind of cultural vacuum where they don’t stop to consider context. It’s why certain people and shows and publications keep running into the same brick wall of public outcry about diversity—because these people consistently demonstrate a callous and willful ignorance of context. They see these lines that shouldn’t be crossed and cross them anyway because they are blissfully unencumbered by context.

I’m not outraged about this one tweet. I’m outraged about the cultural disease that spawned this tweet, the one where certain people are devalued and denigrated for sport and then told to laugh it off because hey, you know, it’s humor.

Or I’m outraged because I was twelve the first time I was called a cunt and I didn’t even know what the word meant. I was nearly thirteen the next time, and by then I did know what the word meant. An old man told me he loved “fresh cunt” and was not shy in detailing what he was going to do to mine. I was wearing a jumper and tights. And that’s also part of the cultural disease, this need to explain to you that I didn’t ask for it, that I was dressed modestly. This particular incident is not even something I have ever spent too much time thinking about because, frankly, it’s one of the lesser offenses. It barely registers until something reminds me of it, like a poorly considered tweet. Cultural disease.

If you get too riled up about this sort of thing, you’re humorless. You’re easily offended. You’re told to “get over it.” You’re told to have a “sense of humor.”

I might be all laughed out.

Rarely does anyone stop to consider that certain groups of people are always the butt of the joke, and, all too often, the jokes are just stupid. Give folks a break, once in a while.

Or, you, sirs, are no George Carlin.

When a wound heals, first the bleeding stops. A scab forms and slowly the skin around the wound grows thicker and stretches under the scab until it reaches the other side of the wound. When the scab falls off, there is new skin, there is healing. But sometimes, wounds aren’t allowed to heal. Sometimes, they are picked at and picked at and picked at, and they stay open, weeping.

Maybe I’m not outraged. I’m exhausted and open and exposed and a lot of other people are too because we are wounds that get picked at and picked at and picked at one day, there won’t be anything left to heal.

Roxane Gay's writing appears or is forthcoming in Best American Short Stories 2012, New Stories From the Midwest 2011 and 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, NOON, Salon, Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, Brevity, and many others. She is the co-editor of PANK, and an HTMLGIANT contributor. She is also the author of Ayiti. You can find her online at http://www.roxanegay.com.
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34 Responses to “How a Wound Heals”

I have very little patience for political correctness overload. And I thought a fair amount of Macfarlane’s material was amusing.

However. His joke about a 9 year old person of color, as well as the Onion’s hackery, really crossed the line. I am not a person of color, so I don’t pretend to know what it’s like having to put up with this crap. I can, however, be very saddened that it’s apparently started at a young age.

AGB, that’s fascinating. Myself, I have very little patience for people who don’t at least care enough about their smug rebuttal to complete it with the essential “however” move after the confession, which also helps supply readers with a reason to endure it. However, I also prefer my fig bars stale so what do I know.

“I’m not outraged about this one tweet. I’m outraged about the cultural disease that spawned this tweet, the one where certain people are devalued and denigrated…”

It would be great, I think if it was only a “cultural disease,” perhaps then it could be truly-permanently cured, remedied, and as you compassionately offer: healed. But culture a.k.a ‘external’ tangible rituals, traditions, acts, I believe is [entirely] the expression of human ‘internal’ ideas, beliefs, emotion, imagination, passion, thoughts etc. In-turn, culture can be passed down and taught, learned and adopted by others who ‘internally’ connect/relate to the expression presented.

Humankind ability to devalue, denigrate, and ultimately tragically decimate each other is an ancient ‘human’ reality and practice not bound by and limited to ethnic diversity.

The tweet, I believe and all other forms of human-on-human atrocity are symptomatic, and primary evidence of the deep, profound innate human ill/disease whose innovation and method [expression] change and evolve concomitantly with technological, scientific, military, industrial et.al innovation and methodology.

Very well stated Roxanne Gay. I have a VERY strong sense of humor and I LOVE funny, clever satire. Humor is cathartic. The ability to laugh at oneself and the absurdities of life is a quality we all need more of. But as the cliche goes you can have “too much of a good thing…”. Women’s bodies as jokes has become tiring especially as we continue to fight for our right to birth control & abortion while men pop Viagra en masse with no questions asked. The word “cunt” has never held any humor whatsoever, unlike “boob”, it’s derisive, derogatory and inflamatory. Too many young girls are used as sex objects in real time for it to be funny in any venue. There is a wealth of funny in daily life. How about comedians move on to some of it and start to respect the female form from which they all came.

An excellent, well-written essay. I was unaware of Seth MacFarlane until Oscar night. I was unimpressed with his ‘humour’ and found his jokes tedious and insulting.
I’d never heard of ‘The Onion’ until last night. The Twitter responses to the crude, tasteless attack to a nine year old girl opened my eyes to ‘The Onion’.
Thank you, Roxanne Gay for thoughfully writing ‘How A Wound Heals’. Your words matter a lot me.

I thought MacFarlane sucked, looking like Beaver Cleaver and uttering nonsense is not my idea of funny. I longed for Bob Hope, Billy Crystal, Whoopi or Ann Hathaway and her stoic co host…why don’t they try something really different next year…a really funny comedian, like the Sleep Walker!~~

Your essay strikes me as right on the money based on everything I’ve heard and/or read about the Oscars last night – how so may people could be so tasteless is beyond me. While there is no way to excuse the tweet about Quvenzhané Wallis, To his credit, The Onion’s CEO, Steve Hannah, was right on it and issued a well worded public apology (if only our politicians would be so responsible.:

Dear Readers,

On behalf of The Onion, I offer my personal apology to Quvenzhané Wallis and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the tweet that was circulated last night during the Oscars. It was crude and offensive—not to mention inconsistent with The Onion’s commitment to parody and satire, however biting.

No person should be subjected to such a senseless, humorless comment masquerading as satire.

The tweet was taken down within an hour of publication. We have instituted new and tighter Twitter procedures to ensure that this kind of mistake does not occur again.

In addition, we are taking immediate steps to discipline those individuals responsible.

Miss Wallis, you are young and talented and deserve better. All of us at The Onion are deeply sorry.

The Onion apologized lightning-fast. So what the hell was the point of this article? It is a tempest in a tea-pot…and inarticulate and misguided attempt to harness legitimate rage at a male-run industry, but choosing the silliest targets to unleash on. A satirical tweet, less than 140 characters, that was deleted and apologized for? An Oscar host who–while dreadfully unfunny–was obviously trying to point out the absurdity of the night?
And your vile and self-dramatizing description of how a wound heals was just awful and embarrassing.
Be smart. Don’t get distracted. And care about more than silly awards programs or worse, a quickly-retracted tweet. As it is, you’re just contributing to the white noise.

I was reading the Providence Journal online edition last week (same state McFarland’s from) and saw an article about a new mother who has an 11 month old daughter with dwarfism. The mother headed a campaign to have Cain Foods change the name of one of their products from Midget Pickles to one less offensive (think “little people”). Cain obliged her and publicy apologized for being insensitive to the diverse nature of humankind. That comment section was amusing, to say the least. One offering that stood out…”There goes Fat Tuesday”. I can remember those heady days on the Berkeley campus during the Free Speech Movement, Lenny Bruce, and (as you mentioned) George Carlin, hard to get Henry Miller novels, etc… Comics and other artists are always pushing back boundaries, opening up new avenues of expression, hopefully breaking the bonds of Censorship (the Man). To imagine that just because these word issues take generations to filter into the mainstream in various forms (high and low) and are becoming accepted does not mean society is any more or less accepting or aware of diversity. Words are misused All The Time…but everyone has the right to use them. It’s not a cultural disease, it’s Cultural Warfare.

Last year’s Oscar host, host Billy Crystal basically called Merly Streep a whore when she was awarded her Oscar. I was totally outraged but when I talked about this with friends, it was as if no one heard it but me. It’s not that I believe being a whore is horrible, either. But the comment was a slap the face of her and women like her: hard-working, older, graceful, pretty, brilliant, competitive and accomplished. The comment was rude, sexist, crass and lame. And, she took it in stride. This year, I was struck by how similar The Oscars are to the Vatican: tired, crusty, oppressive, boring, insulting, sexist, white and did I say BORING?

I find it really depressing that so many people can’t understand the outrage about this beyond the context of it’s just humor. There is more to the issue than what is or isn’t funny. That is the very saddest part of this whole thing.

Thank you Roxane Gay for writing this article. The internet has become a breeding ground for hate, and it makes me sad that deplorable, nasty, and tasteless humor is the norm. I’m glad that you haven’t let anybody convince you otherwise.

I don’t know how you do it, Roxane, how you manage to persist in such a harsh and cruel world. You are an inspiration to women all over the world, especially women in Third World nations who have no voice, who are murdered and tortured for nothing more than the crime of being a woman. Your strength and patience and sheer will to go on, to write, to live, is a testament to the power of the indomitable human spirit. Your words made me cry. I read them to my mother and they made her cry, too. Even my father, who can be detached and casually cynical on even the best of days, was moved, literally, from the couch, to embrace me. I haven’t gotten a hug like that from my father since I was 6 and was in the hospital for pneumonia, an event which has left me with scars to this day in the form of mild PTSD. But these scars, when compared to your wounds, are nothing more than paper cuts. As someone who was made fun of as a little boy, for my long eyelashes, which gave me a decidedly feminine air, and for which I was persecuted, mercilessly, until I hit my teenage years, I can more than empathize with what you are going through. I had a feeling that MacFarlane was doing serious damage on Sunday night, but I really had no idea how much damage he was doing, not until I read your words. To think that while I was gobbling down pizza that there was someone literally writing around in pain at what was transpiring on the television? Well, it leaves me speechless, or, rather, it left me speechless, until I read your words, which, like jumper cables, snapped me out of my catatonia and gave me back the power of speech. I have made myself a promise, and it is a promise I am making to you, that I will never be quiet again, that I will do my share to rid the world of overgrown Frat-Bros like MacFarlane. I’m sure you know that this is an almost impossible task, as men like MacFarlane are a dime a dozen, but something has to be done, must be done. Thank you for galvanizing me, and I hope to meet you one day on the Front Lines.

SARAH DUB you clearly did not really read the article. Yes, the tweet by the Onion was discussed but it wasn’t the driving point of the article. And by clearly not giving a shizzle about any point of view other than your own small, ignorant, and uninformed one in MY opinion, YOU have contributed to the “white noise” plus rape culture. Congrats misogynist! Also let me guess: you are white.

Jennifer Lawrence is winning pretty good. This is before the Oscar win. It’s a perspective, a state of mind. How much of that is “coaching” we’ll never be sure. But from the vibe, I think she’s just her, and when she’s acting more restrained and “proper”, it is more coaching then anything, and then you see that “properness” fade away into her true personality.

The “Q tweet” was dumb as shit; I’ll give you that. But it was also pretty funny, because it was actually said. That is funny because it shows how limited one’s perception is. Although I consider the tweet a lesser offense…

People believe that jokes hold truth in them. So when comics perform acts that poke fun at specific demographics (like you said, there are certain demos that are ALWAYS the butt of jokes), people think there’s some semblance of truth, that the majority of said demographic is this way, and the minority is the exception. That is the Cultural Disease. Human culture, that is. What can you, we, do about it?

You attack this in the schools. Young kids. We were young once. And now look at us — we’re in positions to say things and people listen, do things in the streets/communities and cause change. It will take time, but you start with the young ones.

Makes it difficult when the government is allowing education to lapse. When they’ll be showing Lincoln in schools to give a distorted view of history. But it’s possible. We can change things.

LEAMUR, I did read the article, I just disagree with you. Can you fathom that? Also, I’m not white, I’m yellow. Also, why don’t you continue that strategy of dividing women by their skin color, since that’s worked so well in the past. Hell, you could have also written, “I bet you’re light-skinned”. Get over yourself, lady. I wasn’t defending the tweet — in fact, even the Onion try that. Rather, I said that this is a sideshow, a nothing, a way to divide each other further and be distracted from real issues. And yeah, I think the prose in this piece was a little saccharine.
So yes, I disagreed, and to you that somehow means I don’t look outside myself. But I do. I see the big picture. And this tweet and it’s meaning was over-valued, and now, a few weeks later, you can hopefully see that we women have much much bigger fish to fry. So please, if you want to debate my argument, go ahead. But if you want to judge me by my skin you are basically Bill O’Reilly.

SARAHDUB I can definitely fathom that you disagree with me and I never said (or thought) you were trying to defend the tweet. I guess you got me on the mistake of caring so specifically about your skin color – I should have probably just said “not black”. What’s also insulting is you as a “yellow” person thinking you get to decide what should be important to black women and what shouldn’t. A black woman wrote a whole article about what was important to her and instead of trying to have empathy and understanding on an issue you cannot ever have personally experienced, you decided indulge in literary criticism and essentially dismiss her. And I’M Bill O’Reilly? I also think it’s a really good example of missing the bigger picture. Feminists make the mistake waaaaay too often of deciding that we have “bigger fish to fry” than problems that affect women of color (even “yellow” ones). But you’re entitled to be as condescending and dismissive as you want, so we can keep this up or just agree to disagree. I personally feel like us talking to one another any further is kinda pointless because I have my mind made up about your post and your attitude, but if you feel like something productive can come out of talking to me go for it.

Oh @Leamur, you are the type of brain dead feminist that wants to divide the world by race (good luck with that) and only accept those with the same definition of feminism as you. But there’s strength in diversity — real diversity, not just the whining, whinnying, weak and super-annoying version of victim-mentality you’ve adopted as your life’s purpose. We used to call people like you fascists. Now we just call you irrelevant.

@leamur, sorry if I hurt your feelings, but you were just the perfect encapsulation of someone who thinks they’re being empathetic when in fact they’re deeply racist and ugly (really? a “yellow” person can’t understand these issues?). Good riddance to you.

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